a moment of clarity

Not the Post You Were Expecting

When we last spoke, I left you with the cliffhanger ending of *gasp* considering running LFRs in an attempt to build my ilevel to a respectable level to be prepared for a *gasp* possible return to raiding on a casual basis.

Join us this week for the continuing adventures as the road takes us places we never dreamed of!

DUNH DUHN DUUUUHHHNNNNN!

Did our wayward hero return to LFR in the pursuit of better gear?

Did he return to the hallowed halls of the guild and revel in their camaraderie?

DUNH DUHN DUUUUHHHNNNNN!

Nope.

Our poor mage didn’t get logged in to.

Instead…

I can’t believe I’m about to admit this.

Instead…

I downloaded Final Fantasy XIV.

DUNH DUHN DUUUUHHHNNNNN!

And I may have suspended my WoW account with plans to return with Warlords of Draenor.

So what does this all mean?

I still *like* WoW.

But I’m not *in like* with WoW right now, know what I mean?

I like the concept of playing WoW – of raiding with friends and exploring and questing and hunting down pets and achievement whoring and gathering.

But the reality is I log in and don’t know what the hell to do, don’t remember or know these people, and it all feels meaningless.

And I missed playing with Tir.

But I don’t have the time or energy to devote to getting back deep into the game, the way I want to.

So why pick up a new game?

Because I have no desire to get in deep with this game.

When I didn’t have time to play WoW, I still wanted to play games. I signed up for Steam, and a few sales later I now have about 100 titles.

I can pick them up and drop them whenever I like.

And I can do the same with FFXIV. (Although that dropping may take place at 1 AM. Where does the time go?)

Since I’ve never played this game at max level or at a high level (or at all), I have no deep seated desire to be at the top.

I’m running around doing things in the most difficult way possible, just like when I started WoW, and loving it.

Is FFXIV better than WoW?

In some ways, perhaps. They’ve solved or removed a lot of the common pain points that WoW suffers from, but introduced a boatload of new ones. Pick your poison.

The hardest thing is that FFXIV allows for ZERO add ons. If you don’t like the options available, sucks to be you. Thankfully, there are a lot of options.

The UI is customizable. You can resize and move things around.

You start with a lot of inventory space.

There are minute differences in combat that make life so much easier. You can tell what way a mob is facing – even if said mob is a swarm of bugs – thanks to a simple arrow built into the target circle. There’s a built-in threat meter that captures each mob angry at you.

But there’s no way to tell what your damage is without running a combat log parser. No Recount or Skada. I can see this being both a good thing and a bad thing. Fights seem to be tuned so that everyone needs to pull their weight to win, but finding a slacker DPS would require a lot of experience. But no spamming of epeen charts.

And targeting? TAB is not as tabby as it should be. The logic appears to run, “When TAB is pressed, select the furthest neutral mob that would have ignored the combat if not attacked. Continue to proceed from furthest non-engaged mob closer until choosing the mob that is actively chewing on the player’s face as a last resort.”

No real need for alts. Good? Bad? I don’t know. I made a sexy little ginger kitty and don’t really have a desire to make additional characters since this one can learn EVERYTHING in the game – including all gathering and crafting professions. (I’ll probably update my header rotation to include a shot of him.)

Which brings us to, what about the blog?

Clearcasting isn’t even a mage talent anymore. (Everyone thought I was talking about the Druid ability, anyway.)

But have no fear.

I have no plans to retire the blog.

Unfortunately, I also have no concrete plans to increase my posting. Life just isn’t conducive to a fixed or frequent schedule right now.

But I do want to keep talking about games and other stuff so I’ll be keeping the blog up, even with its inaccurate title.

I’ve got a lot of feels about making the switch from WoW to another game, probably enough to find out if there’s a character limit on these blog posts. I might share them later. I might not.

3 comments on “Not the Post You Were Expecting”

I can’t even figure out what “getting ready” looks like any more. I don’t even have any goblin desires to amass large sums of gold. I think the break will do me good and let me figure out what I want and what I can reasonably get out of the game.

I’m in kind of a similar spot right now. Between my complaints with MoP and feeling utterly underwhelmed by WoD, I’m now on extended leave from WoW. I’ll probably return for a month to do the pre-expansion event and say goodbye to Pandaria, but I don’t plan to pick up WoD until it’s on sale. I don’t see ever giving up on the game entirely, but it’s no longer my default game.

For my part, I’ve given into my gaming schizophrenia entirely and am now jumping around between Neverwinter, TSW, and single-player games depending on my whims.